Satsanga is a transformer. Satsanga is the company of those who are at one with the Reality. “Sat” stands for the Supreme Truth or Reality. “Sanga” is association or company. “Satsanga” means being in close contact with the Supreme. The highest of holy company is to be with God in God-thought or divine contemplation, in meditation, in worship. You get close to the Reality with the aid of these processes.

The visible expression of Divinity upon earth is the great holy fraternity—the saints, the sages, holy people, devotees. God said, “Wherever My devotees abide, there is holy ground”. It is all purified ground. Holy places, to which people go upon pilgrimage in order to bless themselves, derive their holiness from the presence of devotees there. They become holy places because devotees have been there and worshipped God and realized God—thus the places become holy. It is not so much that devotees went there because the places were holy, but the places became holy because the devotees went there. The holy people, the saints, are a purifying force in the world. The world becomes habitable, becomes a place worthy of being lived in, because of these saints. The saints stand for a great ideal. They shine radiantly for a certain experience.

It is an ancient spiritual tradition in India to regard the Holy Ganges as a sacred river, as a divine stream that purifies everyone who goes and bathes in it. How does the Ganges wash away sins? Someone said to Mother Ganges: “To get rid of the sins and impurities that one gathers upon oneself in a single span of earth-life, an individual soul has to do much penance, prayer, pilgrimage, spiritual practice and worship; whereas you, O Mother Ganges, constantly take upon yourself the countless evils and sins of millions upon millions of people, year in and year out. What is your secret, O Mother Ganges, that you are still regarded as the all-holy river?”

It is said that Mother Ganges replied: “If a million sinners come and take bath in me and make me impure, then, if one saint comes and takes a bath or dip in me, I am immediately purified. All the sins of the million vanish like that, for if a saint comes and takes a dip, his all-consuming purity is such that all the earlier impurities are washed away—they vanish”. And the company of such people, contemplation of their lives, the thought of these saints, is a stream, as it were, in which to plunge and take a bath; and such a bath is thousandfold more purifying than a bath in Ganges herself; for, the Ganges stands to be purified by the saints.

Saints stand witness to eternal verities. It is easy to believe that this world exists, because we see it. All our experience is through some sense-perception of this world which is in our immediate presence, which demands recognition. We cannot say the world is not. The invisible, on the other hand, is just an idea to the vast majority until one begins to feel the stirrings of faith in the Eternal. And saints and sages, who have themselves, in their own wondrous life, contacted and realized the Infinite Reality of God, the Great Eternal—they become, as it were, the undeniable and irresistible witness to the presence of the Supreme.

If you are asked, “Why do you believe in God?”, you can just say, “Because the saints exist”, for they are God-filled. You see the son and you know there is a father. Even so, when you see the saints, you know there is that Source of Infinite Bliss and peace, for here in the saints, you visibly see that pristine peace. The saints are filled with that inner peace which is derived from no object. A renunciate saint, perhaps living in a mountain-cave or on the banks of a river, possessionless, absolutely devoid of all earthly wealth, beams with the radiance of joy, not of this earth, and nothing can take that joy away from him; and restless, peaceless, tormented people going to him may even find peace themselves. How the peace comes from him! For he has tapped the immeasurable Source of all peace, all bliss, through the experience of the Divine. The very existence of saints, therefore, becomes proof to the faithful of the existence of the world of the Supreme.